After the Future

Bratton's Anti-TED TED Talk

His point is that TED is to cosmopoliticans what FOX is to conservatives:"TED of course stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and I'll talk a bit about all three. I Think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment." Yes and No.

The whole thing is worth reading, but a couple of grafs from the close to give you a sense of where he's going:

One TED speaker said recently, "If you remove this boundary ... the only boundary left is our imagination". Wrong.

If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.

Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration", it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualisation: the hard stuff that really changes how we think. More Copernicus, less Tony Robbins.

At a societal level, the bottom line is if we invest in things that make us feel good but which don't work, and don't invest in things that don't make us feel good but which may solve problems, then our fate is that it will just get harder to feel good about not solving problems.

As before, yes and no. No, in that I think that Bratton is too hard on imagination. In fact we need a transformation of our collective imagination, which is impoverished by its materialistic assumptions and its spiritual banality.  Yes, in that the materialistic and spiritualy banal is too often celebrated at TED talks. The task demands the intellectual rigor to which he points, but in the end it is an act of imagination that effects the transformation, that changes a geocentric cosmos into a post-Copernican one.

The problem for us now is that too many of us are are living in a late 19th-century social imaginary, and our collective imagination hasn't caught up with what we know. There are many people, maybe more than at any time in history, who are doing the hard work of thinking about complexity. But no one who understands complexity has been able to effectively pull of the Copernican trick for a post quantum theory age. If some have been able to do it for themselves they have not had an impact, at least yet, on the broader collective imagination.

Yes, there's a lot of self-absorbed, Neoliberal-tinged drivel spewed through TED, but  the role that TED or the RSA and other popular education venues can play, and have played when they are at their best, is to take the complexity and to synthesize it in imaginative ways that help reshape our thinking rather than to just reinforce what we already think, as these talks too often do. 

Quote of the Day: Michael Lind

In hindsight, the neoliberal cure was far worse than the New Deal liberal disease. The maturity of the New Deal's system of regulated managerial capitalism coincided with the post-World War II boom and the greatest expansion of the middle class in American history. Consumer advocates, however, blamed it for stifling diversity, libertarians and conservatives claimed it choked off economic progress, and political scientists denounced it for spawning "interest-group liberalism."

To the applause of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, the New Deal system of regulation was dismantled in one sector of the economy after another in the late 1970s and 1980s. The result was not the flourishing diversity hoped for by liberal consumer activists nor the solid sustainable economic growth promised by free-market ideologues. Instead, the result was the collapse of unions, the decline of private R&D, three decades of wage stagnation, and an economy driven by financialization, speculation, and rising debt rather than by productive industry and rising wages. (From his new book, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, p. 391)

It has been a basic assumption of economists that growth is always good. Growth is good, but not any kind of growth to the exclusion of other kinds. Indiscriminate and economic growth is simply not sustainable in the long run. At some point we have to have a broad discussion about what whether the human energies that are so obsessed with economic growth might be redirected to other realms of human flourishing that might be more deeply satisfying and humanizing.

The mixed economy of the New Deal era was a closer approximation of what is needed than the neoliberal, anything-goes economy we have now. 

Intrinsic Motivation and the "School Cliff"

(h/t Dan PInk)

In my ongoing effort to define what Liberalism 5.0 might mean, I want at some point to talk about the work of buisness writer Dan Pink, whose books Whole New Mind, Drive, and most recently, To Sell is Human, are important contributions to our understanding about work and motivation.

His reporting on the research about the negative effects of carrots (as in carrots and sticks) was surprising to me, but made sense the more I thought about it. The key insight is that to the degree that we do things for extrinsic motivations, we lose touch with our intrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivations are what give us purpose and joy; extrinsic rewards give us a quick fix that wears off, and so we demand more or higher intensity fixes in order to feel motivated to do the work. Extrinsic rewards kill intrinsic motivation.

Pink makes clear that reward incentives are necessary for the jobs no one could find any intrinsic motivation to do, but has a negative impact on creative or non alogrithmic work, work that requires imagination, adaptation, innovation. Creative people want to be paid well, but getting paid isn't the thing that gets them up in the morning.

And so when we look at the chart at the top of the post, why do you think that most students at the beginning of their education are "into" it, and by the time they are in high school most are not. Do you think it might happen because they have lost their intrinsic motivation?  Why would that happen?

Pink quotes the Gallup report from which the chart above was taken:

As this Gallup blog post explains: “[Our] research strongly suggests that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become.” Primary school kids begin their educations deeply engaged — but by the time they get to high school, more than half are checked out. And the problem is even worse for our most entrepreneurial students.

Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education, points to several factors for the decline. An “overzealous focus on standardized testing.” Not enough project-based or experiential learning. Too few pathways for students who won’t, or don’t want to, attend college.

Every normal healthy child should be required to attain a basic level of numeracy and literacy, they should know basic things about history, the natural world, art and music, but after 8th Grade kids and their parents should be allowed to choose an educational path that will keep them engaged. Standards, yes. Standardization, no.The school district should ensure the quality of the training and education that the school provides for students who chose these different paths, not insist that every kid meet a university prep standard. 

Education should be a preparation for life, not just for a STEM job. 

Liberalism 5.0?, Part 2

Last week I posted about Walter Russell Mead's article "The Once and Future Liberalism." There is much in it I like, and I think he is correct when he attributes the political impasse that we are in to a futile argument between "conservatives"--Liberal 4.1 types (i.e., New Deal/Great Society Democrats) and reactionaries-- Liberal 3.0 types, (i.e., 19th Century laissez-faire Tea-party types and Ron Paul Libertarians).

I have made the same argument that the New Deal Democrats are the true conservatives, and that those who seek to dismantle the New Deal compromise between government and markets are reactionaries whose thinking is 19th Century Social Darwinism wrapped in the pop Nietzsheanism of Ayn Rand. And while I like Mead's historical anaylysis, I think he could have made clearer that while the "conservatives" belong at the table, the reactionaries do not.

Our dysfunction derives mostly from Republicans' simplistic understanding about the complexity of the reality that we are trying to manage here. Markets are not going to solve climate change or deal with natural disasters, and markets are not going to solve egregious power and wealth imbalances--and the tyranny that comes with them. While the conditions that gave rise to Liberalism 4.0 and 4.1 are quite different from the conditions we are dealing with now, the basic threat of tyranny from powerful private sector interests continues. I think that what I wrote in a 2006 post about Libertarianism and tyranny still holds

 . . . large, complex societies develop large, complex problems that too often cannot be dealt with exclusively on the local level. And in the world we live in the real threat of tyranny comes not from the political sector, but from the economic. For me the fundamental flaw in Libertarian thinking is its failure to recognize this. Tyranny derives from the abuse of power, and so it follows that the greatest threat to freedom comes from those who have the greatest concentrations of power. Look around you. Does that power lie in the hands of Liberal congressmen and professors? Of course not. It lies with those private-sector factions within American society that have enormous economic power. And the greatest threat to American democracy lies not in the power of big government if it serves the will of the broad electorate, but in the power of big government if it serves the will of those with enormous economic power.

Toward the end of his artlcle Mead says, "Developing a politically successful liberalism 5.0 must start with an understanding of what the people want. Americans may be conflicted, but we are not particularly complicated. In a big-picture sort of way, the American people have a Maslovian hierarchy of needs, and we want our political leaders to meet them all." He goes on to lay out five things Americans want: security, prosperity, freedom and autonomy, and for America to fulfil its global mission, and, lastly, for the first four all to work together. Americans are "looking for more than a set of unrelated policies that accomplish certain discrete goals: They want those policies to proceed from an integrated and accessible vision that meshes with their understanding of traditional American values and concerns." 

This is fine as far as it goes, but should we just accept the old definitions of 'security', etc., as givens we have to work with, or is part of developing a Liberalism 5.0 changing our fundamental understanding about what security, prosperity, freedom/dignity, and national purpose means. That's the real task, not just complaining that Liberalism 4.1 no longer cuts it. And clearly we need to think deep and hard how to redefine them. Mead isn't particularly prescient, so I'm going to lay out some preliminary ideas laying out what a Liberalism 5.0 should look like. 

It starts with finding the right balance between the local and the central, the small and the large. Every discussion about  security, prosperity, freedom/dignity, and national purpose starts with a frame regarding our basic assumptions about what these terms mean, and in turn that frame is determined on a macro level by our understanding of how local relates to central, small to big, individual to whole. Our 4.0 v. 3.0 debate is basically an argument that gets nowhere because its basic assumptions about these are so different. 3.0 emphasizes the local and indvidual, and 4.0 the whole and the governmental and economic systems that shape life on the larger systems level.  Subsidiarity has a bias toward the local, but recognizes the necessity for a limited but essential role for the big. 

3.0 is naive about the ways that the individual and the local are interdependent with these larger systems, and they think that society can run just fine without them. They tend to mistake, IMO, bugs for features, and to think that the whole sytem should be blown away, rather than to fix the bugs and make adjustments when needed.

A lot of what must happen for 5.0 will derive from fundamental changes in our thinking, and that requires cultural change. I'm planning a post on Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's book, Conscious Capitalism. Mackey shares a lot of common ground with libertarian thinking that I oppose, and he has gotten a lot of bad liberal press because of his opposition to Obamacare and his indifference about climate change (sure, the climate is warming, but we'll adapt), but I am very interested in his ideas that capitalism has to redefine its mission as "creating value" and not as "maximizing profit". That's should be a key element in Liberalism 5.0. Whether and how that thinking can supplant Gordon (Greed is Good) Gecko/Rick Santelli thinking is an open question, but it's a beginning.

But we are to move forward there must be another fundamental cultural change, which is that collectively we must become less governed by our fears. Prudence, yes; fear, no. I'd argue that almost everything that is dysfunctional in our politics and in our cultural life derives from fears and anxieties that have a soul-constricting effect that makes any kind of creative problem solving an impossibility.

Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State

Is Jerry Brown the model for Liberalism 5.0?

Every once in a while a major politician shocks by actually speaking in a way that politicians rarely speak, i.e., in a way that suggests that he really "gets it". What are the chances considering all the filters that prevent such people from seeing things other than the way the power establishment they inhabit presents things to them.

I've always found Brown to be an intriguing figure, but I don't live in California, and I can't say I've been paying much attention, but the education section in his State of the State Adress earlier today is something I could have written for him. Here's the relevant section, but the whole speech is worth reading:

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child.

We seem to think that education is a thing--like a vaccine--that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work - lighting fires in young minds.

My 2013 Budget Summary lays out the case for cutting categorical programs and putting maximum authority and discretion back at the local level--with school boards. I am asking you to approve a brand new Local Control Funding Formula which would distribute supplemental funds -- over an extended period of time -- to school districts based on the real world problems they face. This formula recognizes the fact that a child in a family making $20,000 a year or speaking a language different from English or living in a foster home requires more help. Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.

With respect to higher education, cost pressures are relentless and many students cannot get the classes they need. A half million fewer students this year enrolled in the community colleges than in 2008. Graduation in four years is the exception and transition from one segment to the other is difficult. The University of California, the Cal State system and the community colleges are all working on this. The key here is thoughtful change, working with the faculty and the college presidents. But tuition increases are not the answer. I will not let the students become the default financiers of our colleges and universities.

BTW, my jaw almost hit the ground when he brought in 'subsidiarity'. It's something I've written frequently about here, but have never heard an elected politician talk about. Here's a post I wrote about subsidiarity  when I was running for School Board in 2011.

Liberalism 5.0?

The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in. --Walter Russell Meade

Last Spring, Walter Russell Mead from Bard College wrote a piece in The American Interest entitled "The Once and Future Liberalism." The first part of the article gives the impression of a standard Libertarian critique of big-government overreach, but he's attempting something more interesting and raises some important questions.

The article is long, so I'll try to summarize his argument here, and then, if I have time this week, I will write some follow-up posts to dig a little deeper into some of the issues he raises. He starts out by describing the history of political liberalism in the Anglo-American world using the Operating System software update metaphor:

Liberalism 1.O: England's Glorious Revolution in 1688. Estabishes a constitutional monarchy and asserts the primacy of parliament over the King. Hobbes and Locke were 1.0 Liberals. Crown-and-altar narrative still essential for national identity

Liberalism 2.O: American Revolution in 1776. Replaces constitutional monarchy of L1.0 with a republic founded on Enlightenment ideas about natural rights. Crown-and-altar narrative and traditions are abolished. Benjamin Franklin starts out as a L1.0 but converts to L2.0. (Limited suffrage. Slavery tolerated.)  

Liberalism 3.0: Manchester Liberalism. "Programs included once unthinkable ideas like universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, an end to state-enforced monopoly corporations, limited government, free markets at home and free trade abroad. . . . More likely to be evangelical than either 1.0 or 2.0 liberals. . . . believed that capitalism, individual rights and a culture of virtue supported by a tolerant, non-fanatical Protestant Christianity could provide ordered liberty. (They also, by and large, believed in the superiority of the white race, thought that “too much” Jewish influence was bad and believed that Catholic countries could never become effective modern democracies.)"

Liberalism 4.0: Late-19th century's Progressive movement that developed in repsonse to social imbalances created by industrial capitalism. Rises to policy during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. If an unholy alliance between church and state was the chief threat to liberty for L1.0-3.0, "the rise of huge industrial corporations seized pride of place as a threat to individual liberty; 20th-century, 4.0 liberals began to think about the state as a possible ally to defend individuals from unaccountable private power. The liberalism of Theodore Roosevelt and men like William Allen White was defined by their response to these challenges. Democratic government needed to ensure a level playing field, to fight for basic equality of opportunity."

Liberalism 4.1: In response to Great Depression and WWII, "turn-of-the-century progressivism was revamped and retweaked into liberalism 4.1, the big government, Iron Triangle system [Feds, unions, large corporations] that most Americans think of when they hear the word “liberal” today." 

Mead argues that the whole mentality behind Liberalism 4.1, the mentality that I have been defending on this blog as the "New Deal Compromise" is obsolete:

Today liberalism 4.1, blue liberalism, is increasingly outdated and backward-looking, but in its time it was a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances, and many of its achievements still demand our respect. The driving force shaping the agenda of 4.0 and 4.1 liberals before and after the New Deal were a series of powerful and profound historical developments that changed the world under their feet. The earlier versions of liberal politics had been built in societies that, while beginning to urbanize and industrialize, were still predominantly agricultural. Both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian liberals saw independent small farmers as the basis of American freedom and democracy.

. . . Although socialists and social democrats sometimes made common cause with 4.1 liberals, at bottom, blue liberalism was built as an alternative to socialism rather than an on-ramp for it. With the onset of the Great Depression in particular, most American liberals came to believe that providing benefits like Social Security and unemployment insurance would inoculate American workers against more virulent forms of socialist ideology and attract new immigrants and their children toward the American liberal tradition. It worked. 

. . . Programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and later the GI Bill, along with the experience of mobilization and rationing during the war, convinced many liberals that government could and should do more than ensure a level playing field, that it could plan, regulate and control well enough to at least bracket a rough equality of economic and social outcomes, not just opportunities. . . . In time, with the advent of the Great Society programs of “the best and the brightest”, liberalism 4.1 became more explicitly redistributionist, and more deeply convinced of the superiority of the technocratic ethos. 

Mead talks about how all the earlier versions of Liberalism--1.0 through 4.1--are inadequate for our situation today, and points to the as yet to be realized "Liberalism 5.0": 

None can serve as the political program for the heirs of the two great revolutions today. We don’t want the constitutional monarchy and Anglican establishment of William III; we don’t want the aristocratic, limited-franchise republic of George Washington; we don’t want the Manchester liberalism of the 1860s; and we don’t want the managerial state that liberals and progressives built in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. That doesn’t mean we should not admire, learn from and build on each of these liberal traditions, but our job today is to synthesize enduring liberal values in a 21st-century liberalism 5.0.

As with earlier versions, liberalism 5.0 must build on the best of what has gone before while making adjustments—radical when necessary, though never gratuitously so—to existing beliefs and institutions. 5.0 liberals must challenge the right of blue [4.1] liberals to own the L-word, seeking both to convince 4.1 liberals to come back to the future and denouncing those who won’t as the blinkered reactionaries and speed bumps they are.

And I agree with him when he says

. . . Many believe that the real ideological contest in America today is between “red” liberalism 3.0 (the more individualistic, laissez-faire, often evangelical kind of liberalism of the 19th century) and the more state-oriented, collectively minded post-World War II 4.1 blue liberalism. Red liberals denounce blue liberals as betrayers of the liberal legacy, as ideology thieves who have taken a philosophy grounded in individual freedom and limited government and turned it into a charter for “big” government. Blue liberals respond that red liberals don’t understand how the complexities of modern life make the outmoded pieties of liberalism 3.0 inadequate to today’s problems. But common to both these positions is the belief that the American debate today is between two versions of the past: the (presumed) free market utopia of the 19th century versus the (presumed) social utopia of the New Deal/Great Society of more recent times. If that were true, this would be a nation of conservatives fighting reactionaries—the status quo of 1970 fighting the status quo of 1880.

I agree that a society dominated by a technocratic ethos is not a good thing, and I am never going to defend government overreach, but the fundamental problem that the early progressives recognized has not gone away: If there is no big government to protect the public interest, a huge, powerful private sector will dominate, and the key players in that sector care only about their own interests, not the public interest. Until the problem of bigness in the private sector is solved, bigness in the public sector is a necessity. Until the disruptive, destablizing effects of market capitalism can be tamed, there must be an adequate way to support the people whose lives have been disrupted and destabilized by it.

If you want to argue that capitalism is so great because it's the most effective wealth engine the world has ever seen, then there have to be mechanisms for distributing that wealth fairly and sanely, and if private market mechanisms fail in that regard, then the public sector must step in to provide the remedy. But if the task now is as Meade puts it to make "a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances," a 5.0 solution cannot be found if the public sector is locked in an ideological argument that pits 4.1 thinking against 3.0 thinking. 

So my argument in defense of the New Deal Compromise is not one that seeks a return to mid-20th Century arrangements--that was then; this is now--but that the New Deal provided for its time a much healthier balance between the interests of the private sector and the public interest that we need to emulate in principle now. This is a balance that was destroyed in the period since 1980, and we saw the destructive impact of this imablance in 2008. Whatever Liberalism 5.0 might be, it must restore this balance. Most of what we think of today as "crisis" derives not from uncontrollable structural changes, but from regressive 3.0 thinking poorly adapted to the real world in which we are living that dominated policy in the first decade of this century.

I would argue that, yes, there are structural issues that we need to deal with, but they could not have been handled worse by the Reagan/Norquist/Cheney resgressive 3.0 mindset. Real problems emerged in the 1970s; the weaknesses of L4.1 were exposed, and the worst possible approach was taken in trying to solve them. A saner approach would have been to make gradual adjustments to 4.1 thinking that might have slowly ratcheted us throught 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, etc., in a more orderly progression toward an eventual 5.0 realignment. Instead we've had reactionaries in the driver's seat dominated by 19th-Century 3.0 thinking. Meade correctly points out that it's a mistake to think that the argument is between 4.1  and 3.0 thinking, but seems not to be willing to point out the obvious, that 3.0 thinking ought not to have a place at the table at all. The real debate should be about finding ways to push basic 4.1 arrangements to be more adaptive to the changing global economic realities. 

Whenever anybody tells you that there is no money for entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, or Medicaid, they are talking ideological nonsense. The fiscal crisis at the federal, state, and local levels was engineered by no-taxes/no regulation ideologues on a mission to destroy the legitimacy of government. There is plenty of room for debate about how to find the right balance between the private and public sectors, but you cannot find that balance with people who think that the government has no legitimate role to play in redressing social and economic imbalances created by private markets. We don't have a resource problem; we have a thinking problem.

Anyway, Meade talks about five things that Americans want from American socieity. When I have a chance, I want to examine them, show where I agree and perhaps lay out a few other things that I think will be necessary for a workable 5.0.